Even to her own ears the cry was garbled. No one on the other side could possibly hear it, and it was stupid of her, anyway—she should’ve gone back downstairs and risked another ladder. Why had she gone all the way to the ground floor? What had she been thinking?
Her head was humming with leftover pain and her eyes were swimming with static.
“Help me, please, get me out of here!”
She beat the door with the butt of her rifle, and it created a magnificent racket.
Seconds later, another racket met it from the other side.
“What the hell’s the matter with you? Should’ve gone down the outside!” the shouty voice accused.
“Tell me about it,” she grumbled, relieved to hear the other person even though she didn’t know if he planned to help her or kill her on sight. Whoever he was, he’d gone to trouble enough to make contact, and that was something. Wasn’t it?
She said, louder, “Get me out of here!”
“Get away from the door!”
Having learned her lesson about responding fast, she sidestepped her way around the hotel’s front desk. A new and catastrophic crash bowed the front door inward, but didn’t break it. A second assault cracked the thing’s hinges, and a third took it clear off the frame.
An enormous man hurtled through it, then dragged himself to a stop.
“You—” He pointed and stopped himself midthought. “Are a woman.”
“Very good,” Briar said, wobbling out from behind the desk.
“All right. Come with me, and do it fast. We haven’t got a minute before they start reviving.”
The man with the tinny voice was speaking through a helmet that gave his face the shape of a horse’s head crossed with a squid. The mask ended in an amplifier down front, and it split into two round filters that aimed off to either side of his nose. The contraption looked heavy, but then again, so did the man who was wearing it.
He wasn’t fat at all, but he was nearly as wide as the doorway—though the effect was enhanced by his armor. His shoulders were plated with steel, and a high, round collar rose up behind his neck to meet the helmet. Where his elbows and wrists bent, makeshift chain mail functioned as joints. Across his torso, thick leather straps held the whole thing taut and close.
It was as if someone had taken a suit of armor and made it into a jacket.
“Lady, we haven’t got all night,” he told her.
She began to say that it wasn’t night, yet, but she was winded and worried, and irrationally glad for the company of this heavily armed man. “I’m coming,” she said. She stumbled and knocked against his arm, then righted herself.
He didn’t grab her to help, but he didn’t push her away, either. He only turned around and headed back out the door.
She followed. “What was that thing?” she asked.
“Questions later. Watch your step.”
The street and walkways were littered with the tangled, twitching, growling bodies of rotters. Briar’s first steps took trouble to avoid them, but her escort was outpacing her, so she abandoned the approach and moved from corpse to corpse without regard for where her feet might land. Her boots broke arms and stomped through ribcages. Her heel landed too close against a dead woman’s face and scraped down her skull, dragging a sheet of flaky skin with it and leaving the flesh wiped upon the stones.
“Wait,” she begged.
“No waiting. Look at them,” he said, as he too disregarded the quivering rotters.
Briar thought it was a ridiculous instruction. She couldn’t help but look at them; they were everywhere—underfoot and down the road, flattened against curbs and leaning against bricks with their tongues lolling and their eyes fluttering.
But she thought she understood the armored man’s meaning. Animation was returning to their limbs. Their jerking hands moved harder, and with more deliberation. Their kicking feet were twisting and turning, trying to work themselves up to a standing position. Every second that passed, they gathered their wits—such as they were—or at least gathered their intuitive sense of motion.
“This way. Faster.”
“I’m trying!”
“That’s not good enough.” He threw back a hand and seized her wrist. He yanked her forward, lifting her as lightly as a toddler over another stack of restless, prone rotters.
One of the gruesome things held up a hand and tried to grab Briar’s ankle.
She kicked at its twiggy arm but she missed, because the man in the mask shifted his grip on her wrist and pulled again, past one last clump of bodies where a rotter was sitting up and moaning, trying to rouse its brethren.
“All right, it’s a straight shot now” the man said.
“A straight shot to what?”
“To the underground. Hurry. This way.”
He indicated a stone-faced structure adorned with the mournful statues of owls. A legend across the front door declared that the place had once been a bank. The front door was nailed shut with the remains of shattered shipping crates, and the windows were covered with bars.
“How do we—?”
“Stay close. Up, then down.”
Around the side there were no helpful fire escapes with dangling ladders, but when Briar looked up she could see the underside of a rickety balcony.
The man in the steel jacket pulled an ugly hooked hammer out from his belt and tossed it up. It trailed a long hemp rope behind it, and when it snagged somewhere above, the man yanked on the rope and a set of stairs unfolded. They clanked down with all the loud, rhythmic grace of a drawbridge descending too quickly.
He caught the bottom stair and strained to hold it low. It hung at Briar’s waist level.
“Up.”
Briar nodded and slung her rifle over her back, freeing both hands for climbing.
It wasn’t fast enough to suit the man, who reached up with one broad palm and heaved it against her rear. The added jolt boosted her enough to fasten both hands and both feet securely onto the structure, so she wasn’t prepared to make any complaints about the ungentlemanly gesture.
Her body’s weight was pendulum enough to hold the stairs in a hovering position over the street. When the man’s weight joined hers, the whole structure creaked and jerked, but held steady. The folding stairs did not wish to hold them both, and they made their displeasure known with every ominously squeaking step.
Briar tuned it out and climbed, and the stairs rose up underneath her like a seesaw as the man behind her caught up to her heels.
He patted at the back of her boot to get her attention. “Here. Second floor. Don’t break the windoiv. It lifts out.”
She nodded and hauled herself off the steps, onto the balcony. The window was barred but not blockaded. Down at the bottom, a wooden latch had been affixed. She pried it up and the window popped out of its frame.
The man joined her on the balcony, and the steps bounced up behind him. Having lost their counterweight, the springs that dropped and lifted it coiled back into place and remained firm, holding the stairs beyond the reach of even the tallest rotters with the longest arms.
Briar lowered her head, turned herself sideways, and wiggled inside.
The armored man squeezed himself in after her. Much of the urgency had drained away from him; once he was above the rotters and safely inside the old bank building, he relaxed and took a moment to adjust his accoutrements.
He unhooked his armor and stretched his arms, and cracked his neck from side to side. The clawed hammer with the rope required rewinding, so he twisted it between his palm and his elbow until it made a loop, and then he clipped it back onto his belt. He reached into a holster over his shoulder and set aside a tube-shaped device that was longer than his thigh. It was shaped like a huge gun, but the trigger was a brass paddle and there was a grate across the barrel that was not altogether different from the grate in his mask.
Briar asked, “Is that what made the noise? The one that stunned the rotters?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “This is Dr. Minnericht’s Doozy Dazer, or plain old ‘Daisy’ for short. It’s a mighty piece of equipment and I’m proud to call it mine, but it has its limitations.”
“Three minutes?”
“Three minutes, give or take. That’s right. The power supply’s in the back end.” He pointed to the handle, wrapped with tiny copper pipes and slender glass tubes. “It takes forever to charge the thing back up again.”
“Forever?”
“Well, about a quarter of an hour. Depending.”
“On what?”
He said, “Static electricity. Don’t ask me any more than that, because I don’t know the particulars.”
She politely admired the blasting device. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Who’s this Dr. Minnericht?”
“He’s an ass, but sometimes he’s a useful ass. So now I have to ask, who are you and what are you doing here, in our fine and filthy city?”
“I’m looking for my son,” she dodged the first half of his question. “I think he came here yesterday; he came up through the old water runoff tunnels.”
“Tunnels are closed” he said.
“Now they are, yes. Earthquake.” She leaned against the windowsill and sat there, too exhausted to bother with too many words. “I’m sorry,” she said, and she meant it for a variety of reasons. “I’m so… I knew about the city—I knew it was bad in here. I knew, but…”
“Yeah, it’s that ‘but’ that’ll kill you if you’re not careful. So you’re looking for your boy.” He checked her up and down. “How old are you?” he asked outright, since he couldn’t see her face very well behind her mask.
“Old enough to have a son who’s dumb enough to come in here,” she countered. “He’s fifteen. Have you seen him?”
“He’s fifteen—that’s the best description you got?”
“How many random fifteen-year-old boys can this place possibly get in a week?”